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Plain Vanilla Web

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Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#321

Post by socalgal2 »

c-linkage wrote: post #87
smokel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, many systems that were originally implemented as native desktop applications have since been migrated to the web. The motivation for this shift is not particularly strong from a technical standpoint, but it is a practical one: deploying native applications is simply too costly. The web finally provides a widespread standard for deploying applications inexpensively. Unfortunately, the technology use…

> deploying native applications is simply too costly. I do not understand why people hold this impression, especially in corporate environments. Windows supports both system and per-user deployments; the latter so you don't even need administrator rights. And with Intune, deployments can be pulled or pushed. Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's prein…

Building a game for multiple platforms for steam is way more work than building a single web app. Builting the game often requires unique settings for each platform, machines for each target platform, testing on each target platform, dealing with bugs on each target platform. Getting noterized/certified on each

> EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

How many games are multi-platform on steam? Checking the top 20 current most played games, 14 of them are windows only. If it's so easy to be multi-platform, why would 14 of the top 20 games not be multi-platform? Oh, it's because it's NOT EASY. Conversely, web apps are cross platform by default.

Only 2 of the top 20 games supported 3 platforms (windows, mac, steam-deck). 1 was windows+steam-deck, 3 were windows+mac

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#322

Post by JodieBenitez »

lucb1e wrote: post #255

Can we just use links to go between pages, instead of toggling css display:none on custom elements to show different "pages"? You're replacing browser functionality with custom code. To get on par with browser default functionality, you need to implement a loading indicator, error handling, back/forward button handling, address bar updates, opening links in a new tab when someone middle clicked or ctrl clicked, new w…

Indeed... I'd critisize SPAs a lot less if they wouldn't try to (poorly) mimic MPAs that often.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#323

Post by bigtones »

donohoe wrote: post #66

I'm not against frameworks, but in many cases, they're unnecessary. I've always questioned why we should add 100KB of JavaScript to a page before writing a single line of real code. My team and I built https://restofworld.org without any frameworks. The feedback, from surveys, outreach, and unsolicited emails, has been overwhelmingly positive, especially around usability and reading experience. We might adopt a frame…

Rest of World looks like a fantastic news website I was not familiar with. I just spent a half hour reading a whole bunch of interesting articles there. Well done for helping build it - its super fast from Australia.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#324

Post by mickael-kerjean »

lolinder wrote: post #164
donohoe wrote: post #66

I'm not against frameworks, but in many cases, they're unnecessary. I've always questioned why we should add 100KB of JavaScript to a page before writing a single line of real code. My team and I built https://restofworld.org without any frameworks. The feedback, from surveys, outreach, and unsolicited emails, has been overwhelmingly positive, especially around usability and reading experience. We might adopt a frame…

I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…

> it doesn't require them because it's a blog.

A counter example is Filestash [1], a full fledge file manager that can open > 100 file (from parquet, arrow, geojson, shp, raw images, etc...). Since it got moved out of React, the app perform better by every single metric than the original one. While I agree there's no team of 30 behind it, so is tons of software with people blindly defaulting to React for the same reason than people choose IBM: nobody get fired for choosing IBM / React.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#325

Post by recursivedoubts »

benatkin wrote: post #219
90s_dev wrote: post #9

I am not sold on web-components yet. Especially now with @scoped and import{type:css}, I think there's still a lot of merit to rendering an element statically, shipping it, and updating it dynamically via modern JS. I'm not sold on how people typically do that, and I think we should keep trying to innovate outside of the typical frameworks like React/Svelte, but I definitely don't see any part of web-components being…

I think it’s time to go back to Unobtrusive JavaScript. What is needed for this are lightweight libraries or practices you can code yourself. HTMX is lightweight which is nice but it’s like script tags. I would rather the urls and methods go in plain HTML and stuff like hx-target be determined by JavaScript, using data- attributes if needed. That way all the unused HTMX features aren’t included.

see also https://github.com/bigskysoftware/fixi

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#326

Post by ismi »

wim wrote: post #210
lolinder wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…

We're building a collaborative IDE for tasks and notes [1] from scratch without frameworks/dependencies. Not saying frameworks are never the right answer of course, but it's as much a trade-off for complex apps as it is for blogs. Things like performance, bundle size, tooling complexity, easy of debugging and call stack depth, API stability, risk of hitting hard-to-work-around constraints all matter at scale too. [1]…

I love it! All ES6, no deps.. probably makes your lives harder than they should be but in the name of pureness and badassery and complete control over performance, awesome! You choose to suffer for the right reasons. Wishing you the best of luck and that I can try it soon.

Forgot to say.. I very much admire and appreciate the aspect of "ejectability". More software should strive for this ideal.

https://thymer.com/ejectable-apps

I read that and nod all the way through. Hope you succeed!

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#327

Post by degamad »

Swizec wrote: post #192
lolinder wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…

I work on a site that was built without frameworks with just a sprinkle of jQuery on top of a traditional MVC framework. It worked great but then the business grew and the software became bigger than what fits in 1 engineer’s head. We now have lots of issues that need fixing. A good example are pages that take 5 seconds to load because they have to do so much, then you submit a form, and the page reload takes 5 secon…

I agree with you about the customer-facing issues which occur with vanilla sites which don't deliver good user experience.

However, I'm interested in how frameworks solve the developer experience problem you mentioned:

> Will this javascript file you touched affect only the feature you wanted, or another 50 pages you didn’t even know about?

> When you add a new thing in a template, how many N+1 issues across how many pages did you just cause?

> Where does the data even get loaded??

Doesn't this just change into

- "Will changing this React component affect only the feature I want, or do other pages interact with it differently?"

- "When adding a new component into a template, will I break any other pages which use this template?"

- "Where does the data even get loaded??"

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#328

Post by andrewrn »

lolinder wrote: post #164
donohoe wrote: post #66

I'm not against frameworks, but in many cases, they're unnecessary. I've always questioned why we should add 100KB of JavaScript to a page before writing a single line of real code. My team and I built https://restofworld.org without any frameworks. The feedback, from surveys, outreach, and unsolicited emails, has been overwhelmingly positive, especially around usability and reading experience. We might adopt a frame…

I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…

I like this framing the most. My personal website is vanilla, and my SPA-like apps are with React. I originally chose vanilla for my personal website bc I thought it'd keep refreshing my fundamentals... but actually its simple enough that vanilla is actually just the correct choice.

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#329

Post by lolinder »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #324
lolinder wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this comment is a great example of the total disconnect these conversations always have. On the one hand we have lots of people on here who are building full-featured web apps, not websites, on teams of 30+. These people look at frameworkless options and immediately have a dozen different questions about how your frameworkless design handles a dozen different features that their use case absolutely requi…

> it doesn't require them because it's a blog. A counter example is Filestash [1], a full fledge file manager that can open > 100 file (from parquet, arrow, geojson, shp, raw images, etc...). Since it got moved out of React, the app perform better by every single metric than the original one. While I agree there's no team of 30 behind it, so is tons of software with people blindly defaulting to React for the same rea…

You and a few others are missing the point, which means I probably failed to communicate super effectively. Counterexamples aren't really a thing here because my point isn't that you do or don't need a framework for any specific kind of project, my point is that requirements vary and you can't talk framework vs frameworkless without talking requirements.

A blog is just one example of a place where frameworks don't help, chosen because the site OP shared is functionally the same as a blog. Other applications have different requirements and those requirements may also not benefit from a framework. Alternatively, the requirements themselves may actually have benefited from a framework and the authors chose to avoid them because the team preferred not to or because they felt strongly about avoiding frameworks because of personal preference.

In this case, this project has really one active contributor [0], so it's missing one of the key ingredients that in my experience really call for a framework: coordination between a large number of people.

(And lest I be mistaken: just because a project has a large number of people does not mean a framework would for sure be the best choice. I'm sure there are counterexamples to that too! It's just a hint in that direction, not an ironclad law.)

[0] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/graphs/contribu...

Re: Plain Vanilla Web

#330

Post by cosmic_cheese »

sofixa wrote: post #208
coolcase wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with Flash and Silverlight except each being controlled by a single company. I liked those technologies. Adobe Flex was very nice to program in and use for it's time.

Both were absurdly slow and resource intensive.

Nothing got my old iMac G5 whipped into a frenzy like loading a page that had Flash on it somewhere. I’m not kidding when I say that there were many areas in World of Warcraft, a full-fat seamless open world 3D MMORPG, that didn’t make its fans as angry as Flash could manage to.

I was so happy when it finally started to disappear. That kind of sheer disregard for my system resources is inexcusable.

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